The Hoax

Utah Congressman Douglas R. Stringfellow, 32, supporting himself with canes and leg braces, made his way painfully into a studio at Salt Lake City's television station KSL-TV one night last week. He had come to talk about his war record.

Stringfellow had been talking about the same subject for years. A paraplegic veteran of World War II, he got a job as an Ogden, Utah, radio announcer. In his spare time he made scores of speeches to Mormon church gatherings and civic groups. The story, as it evolved after hundreds of repetitions, was that he had been assigned to the OSS, parachuted behind German lines with 29 other men and kidnaped a German atomic scientist named Otto Hahn. Every other member of the mission, Stringfellow said, was later killed. He said that he was captured and tortured, then escaped to France, where he was crippled by a land mine.

The story was so good that Stringfellow began to get speaking dates far and wide. He collected a mantelful of awards from civic and veterans' organizations, and this year he was named by the junior chamber of commerce as one of the ten most out standing young men in the nation. He ran for Congress as a Republican in 1952 and won easily. Up for re-election this fall, he looked a sure winner. This year his story was told on nationwide TV programs (This Is Your Life and Suspense).

But persistent reports began to be heard that Stringfellow's story was not true. When reporters tried to check with the

Defense Department, they were met by a strange reticence, which turned out to be fear of offending a Congressman. Last week the Army Times, an unofficial military journal, said that the Stringfellow story would not hold water. He blustered about a libel suit and asked President Eisenhower to open secret CIA files. Next day Stringfellow was called into a huddle with Utah's two Republican Senators, Arthur Watkins and Wallace F. Bennett (both fellow Mormons). Under their questioning, he caved in, and that night he told the TV audience the truth.

He said that in his early speeches he was repeatedly asked for more details about his war record. Said Stringfellow: "Somewhere along the line, the idea . . . was integrated in introductions that Doug Stringfellow was a war hero . . . Like many other persons suddenly thrust into the limelight, I rather thrived on the adulation and new-found popularity ... I began to embellish my speeches with more picturesque and fanciful incidents. I fell into a trap, which in part had been laid by my own glib tongue." The facts, he said, were these: "I was never an OSS agent. I never participated in any secret, behind-the-lines mission ... I never captured Otto Hahn or any other German physicist ... I wish before my Heavenly Father that I might undo this wrong." Stringfellow offered to withdraw from the election if the party asked him.

After the program he sobbed in the arms of his wife, while kindly old Arthur Watkins looked on. This week the Utah Republican leaders called a meeting to decide what to do about Doug Stringfellow.

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