Change of Scene & Situation

When he sat before the cameras on Capitol Hill (TIME. Feb. 14 et seq.),False Witness Harvey Matusow appeared to enjoy his role. He babbled about his stringless Yo-Yo. eagerly called himself a liar, and caused consternation among Congressmen, who thought he should be jailed for perjury. The legal problem: Could the Government, in prosecution for perjury, clearly establish specific Matusow lies, as distinguished from his occasional truths? Last week, for Harvey Matusow, both the scene and the situation changed.

Witt's End. Matusow went to El Paso to testify that he had lied when he helped to convict Clinton Jencks, an official of the Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers' Union, which was thrown out of the C.I.O. in 1950 for being Communist-dominated. On the strength of Matusow's recanting, Jencks, who had been convicted of falsifying a non-Communist affidavit, was requesting a new trial. The motion was being heard before Federal District Judge Robert Thomason, a onetime Democratic Congressman with a reputation as a liberal and a first-class lawyer. Judge Thomason changed the situation for Matusow.

When Communist Lawyer Nathan Witt, representing Jencks, refused to answer whether he is now or ever has been a Communist, Judge Thomason threw Witt out of court. He held that a lawyer has a special duty to deny himself the protection of the Fifth Amendment in a case where he is counsel. After hearing the evidence, Judge Thomason made two more clear-cut decisions. He denied Jencks's motion. for a new trial, and then he turned to the Matusow problem.

Matusow's Comeuppance. Said Judge Thomason: "Matusow, alone or with others, willfully and nefariously and for the purpose of defrauding this court and subverting the true course of the administration of justice . . . schemed to and actually used this court of law as a forum for the purpose of calling public attention to a book, purportedly written by Matusow, entitled False Witness. This court finds the fact to be that as early as Sept. 21, 1954, responsible officials of the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers . . . subsidized the writing and publication of this book ... I find that Matusow willfully . . . lent himself to this evil scheme for money and for notoriety.

"It is my firm conviction, moreover, that this hearing was deliberately brought on for the purpose of attacking the judgment of this court, attacking the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department, in a carefully thought-out scheme to generally discredit . . . the testimony of undercover agents and former Communist Party members . . . Matusow [has] obviously made an effort to convert these proceedings into a trial of the Department of Justice rather than of the issues before the court."

Thereupon. Judge Thomason found Matusow guilty of contempt of court, a finding that avoided the legal complications involved in a perjury charge. He sentenced Matusow to three years in prison, and ordered him held in $10,000 bail. At that point. Matusow's stock appeared to have reached a new low. An El Paso bondsman, only recently released from the penitentiary, where he served sentence for receiving stolen goods, said: "I wouldn't post bond for that S.O.B."

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