Change of Front

The Congressman could scarcely believe his ears. "You would keep a Communist in school and let the Government pay?" demanded Ohio's Charles H. Elston. Said AEC Chairman David Lilienthal flatly: "I would."

Lilienthal was trying to explain to the Joint Atomic Energy Committee why AEC had granted a $1,600 fellowship to Hans Freistadt, a University of North Carolina student and an avowed Communist (TIME, May 23). He had an uneasy time of it. And when the Joint Committee was through with him, a Senate subcommittee considering the AEC appropriation seized hapless Chairman Lilienthal and put him on a grill of its own.

Waters, Fingers, Wells. Lilienthal seemed to be trying to make two points. One of them was that where no secret information was involved (and therefore no question of national security), no federal investigation of a federal scholarship holder was justified. Mixing his metaphors, Lilienthal declared: "Once you have passed the secrecy line, you are in the broad, tragic waters of the federal government's finger in education." His other point was that such bans, once begun, might be extended to "potentially subversive" students. Bureaucratic decisions "as to who is pure and who is not pure" would, he cried, "poison the wells of academic freedom . . . Our descendants will spear our graves if we go that far."

To the Senators on the committee, these impassioned words seemed scarcely to fit the case. Snapped Wyoming's Joseph C. O'Mahoney: "A completely doctrinaire and unrealistic attitude ... It is not a question of whether an individual may attend a school or speak freely. The issue is whether AEC shall use public funds to educate persons who are members of an organization pledged to overthrow our government."

Glaring at a list of 500 AEC scholarship-holders, Michigan's Homer Ferguson demanded to be told how many Communists there were among them. "Perhaps as many as three," Lilienthal admitted. One of these, explained Dr. Shields Warren, AEC's director of biology and medicine, was "an outstanding student" named Isador Edelman. Edelman, 29, had applied for a fellowship at the University of California's Berkeley laboratory (where he would have been close to secret work), had been turned down because an FBI check disclosed "derogatory information." But because he "showed extraordinary promise," AEC granted him a $3,750 fellowship at the Harvard Medical School, where he would have no contact with classified work. (At Harvard, Dr. Edelman declared he was an antiCommunist, but admitted he had been briefly interested and "probably" had applied for Communist Party membership as a student six years ago. He is now engaged, said Edelman, in the study of urine and other body fluids.)

Clear Provision. By week's end, be-leagured David Lilienthal had a public change of heart. Hereafter, he declared, the AEC would demand an anti-Communist affidavit from all applicants. The private National Research Council (which had been picking the fellows for AEC) agreed to this procedure. Said Lilienthal, completing his change of front: "I have no question at all that we should not provide public funds for anyone who advocates the overthrow of this government by force or violence . . . whether [the work] is secret or non-secret." Just to make doubly sure, O'Mahoney announced he would "write into law a provision of such clarity" that Lilienthal would have no other choice.

Two years ago David Lilienthal had won the respect of the nation with a warm and firm defense of his liberal credo. Last week, again under fire and retreating in confusion, he lost some of that respect.

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