Case No. 54

On Feb. 20, 1950, in his now-famed Senate speech listing 81 State Department security cases, Joe McCarthy reached Case No. 54. He said: "This individual has been connected with a number of Communist-front organizations . . . [He] is presently employed in the State Department." Case No. 54 was the only one of McCarthy's 81 ever indicted. In court last week, the case collapsed.

The Unfashionable Cause. No. 54 was Economist Val R. (for Rogin) Lorwin, 46, adopted son of eminent Labor Economist Lewis Lorwin, who in 1934 went to Washington to work for the Taft family on the state papers of President William Howard Taft. Soon, he moved on. Lorwin and his wife joined the Socialist Party in 1935; with eager energy they plunged into work for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, a bitter Socialist rival of the Communist-led Sharecroppers Union. Lorwin worked in several New Deal agencies until the war when he was an Army lieutenant assigned to the OSS. In 1946 he joined the State Department. Within two years State was checking security charges against him.

Lorwin, who had quit the Socialist Party in 1938, denied that he had ever had the slightest sympathetic connection with the Communists. He says: "I happen to have years of rather cantankerous anti-Communist activity on my record long before it became fashionable to be anti-Communist."

In January 1949, the charges against Lorwin were dropped. A year later he went to France on leave from State to write a book on French labor. He was there when McCarthy publicized his 81 anonymous cases. In the fall the State Department called Lorwin home to face its loyalty board.

The Red Card. The FBI, in rechecking McCarthy's 81 cases, had turned up a new witness, Harold W. Metz, who had been a graduate student with Lorwin at Cornell. In 1935 they met again in Washington, and Metz lived for a few months as a paid roomer in the Lorwins' apartment. Metz, a onetime researcher for the Republican National Committee (and now on the staff of the Hoover Commission) told the FBI that one evening some "strange-looking people" were leaving the apartment as he entered. Asked about them, Lorwin said there had been a Communist-cell meeting and flashed a red card to prove that he was a party member.

Lorwin said he may have said some such thing jokingly; he may have flashed his Socialist card, which was red, whereas the Communist card then was a black, 16-page booklet. Under oath he swore that he had never been a Communist. The board cleared him of loyalty charges, but in February 1951 suspended him as a security risk. Later, McCarthy publicly took credit for Lorwin's suspension.

Friends and acquaintances who knew Lorwin's record rallied to his defense; they helped to support his case that he had been not merely non-Communist but actively antiCommunist. In March 1952, the board gave him complete clearance again and ordered him restored to duty with full back pay. Lorwin went back to work only long enough to call attention to his vindication, resigned, returned to Cornell for his Ph.D. In September 1953 he became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. While attending a Chicago luncheon of labor leaders on Dec. 4, 1953, he was called to the phone and told that he had just been indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington on three criminal counts of falsely denying Communist connections.

McCarthy chortled publicly.

The Fearless City. In federal court last month, Lorwin's attorneys demanded the record of the loyalty-board hearings so as to prepare their defense. The Justice Department prosecutor, William A. Gallagher, 53, a veteran attorney, refused. Judge Edward M. Curran ordered him to produce the records within five days.

On the sixth day, instead of Gallagher with the records, Assistant Attorney General Warren Olney III appeared with a surprise. In checking the case, said Olney, he found "irregularities." Gallagher had obtained the indictment by telling the grand jury that the Government would produce two FBI witnesses to corroborate Metz, and that Lorwin, "like other Communists," would probably refuse to answer questions, pleading the Fifth Amendment. Actually, Lorwin had never taken refuge in the Fifth Amendment. The FBI never had any witnesses who could corroborate Metz's testimony.

Two days after the case was dismissed, Attorney General Herbert Brownell fired Gallagher. "We have a duty over and above prosecution and convictions," said Brownell, "to see that justice is done."

Val Lorwin himself survived his four-year fight tired but unterrified. Many government workers were among the 91 who testified in his favor; none were threatened or pressured. Legal costs will total more than $10,000, but already some 300 people have sent contributions. All in all, Lorwin felt his triumph was a tribute to American sanity and justice.

"Not one person--or rather, only one person--turned his back on me," he said. "People who were only acquaintances became my friends when they heard I was involved in this case . . . People I knew joked about having their telephones tapped, but they phoned me anyhow. There is said to be a great deal of fear along the Potomac, but I can testify it has not taken over the city."

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