Full Cooperation

Old Communist Earl Browder has been in & out of enough courtrooms in his time to make him a pretty fair curbstone lawyer in his own right. When he went on trial in Washington a fortnight ago for contempt of Congress, he disdainfully brushed aside the aid of a court-appointed lawyer, argued his own defense and promptly put his finger on the soft point in the government's case.

It was true, said Counselor Browder, that he had refused to answer 16 questions put to him by the Tydings sub-committee investigating Communist activity in the State Department. But they had not really been pertinent to the committee's line of inquiry. Furthermore, they had been minority questions, asked by Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper. A witness, he explained smoothly, is not obliged to answer minority questions unless ordered to do so by the committee chairman--and Chairman Tydings had issued no such orders.

Then Browder produced his clincher. For his only defense witness, he called up none other than Wisconsin's Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, self-appointed _ commander in the war on Communism in the U.S. From the moment McCarthy began to speak, it was plain that he was determined to continue his feud with Maryland's Millard Tydings even if it meant giving aid & comfort to the Reds themselves.

"In all my experience as a judge and as a lawyer," said Joe, easing back in the witness chair, "I don't think I have ever seen more perfect cooperation between a witness and the chairman of a committee. Whenever the chair indicated it wanted the witness to testify, the witness testified. When the witness refused to testify, it appeared to be with the wholehearted approval of the chair.

"The witness," McCarthy went on with evident relish, "was doing exactly what the chairman wanted him to do. The chair, I felt, was not interested in eliciting information from the witness which would indicate the presence of Communists in Government. The chairman was trying to conduct a whitewash."

After that, there was not much more the Government could do; its case had evaporated into thin air. Last week Federal Judge F. Dickinson Letts threw it out of court and dismissed the jury. Said a blandly triumphant Earl Browder: "When demagogues fall out, honest men have a better opportunity to protect their liberties. Senator McCarthy, having driven the committee out on a limb, then proceeded to cut it off."

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