Not One Iota

Seventeen months after the career of Army Dentist Irving Peress became a public issue, the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last week issued its report on the case. The subcommittee found what had been obvious from the first (TIME, March 8, 1954): the promotion and honorable discharge of Major Peress, after he refused to answer questions about Communist affiliations, was entwined in red tape, not in Red subversion.

"Individual errors in judgment, lack of proper coordination, ineffective administrative procedures, inconsistent application of investigating regulations, and excessive delays," were the subcommittee's words for it. Army Secretary Robert Ten Broeck Stevens (or his Defense Department superiors), said the report, should be "criticized for the delay of almost one year before the facts concerning the Peress case were publicly released." It added that former Army Counselor John Adams showed "disrespect for this subcommittee" when he chose to disregard a request from Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy that Peress' discharge be held up. Then the subcommittee listed 48 instances of snarled red tape: e.g., "the failure of Major Stambaugh, G2, First Army, upon receipt of Peress' DD Form 398 (in which Peress refused to list organizations to which he had belonged), to initiate action looking to cancellation of active-duty orders."

Six members of the subcommittee, including McCarthy, signed the report. But Ohio Republican George Bender, who holds the Senate seat previously occupied by Robert Taft, refused. The subcommittee, Bender pointed out, had found nothing to substantiate Joe McCarthy's screams that "a secret master" of the Pentagon had controlled the Peress case. The report, said Bender, should have spelled out the obvious fact that "not one iota of evidence was revealed to indicate any subversion, collusion, or Communist conspiracy concerned with the handling by the military of the Peress matter."

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