Senator McCarthy responded that the President was "afraid" to allow a Senate investigating committee to examine secret files which the Senator claimed would prove his allegations. He also revealed that he had asked Secretary of State Acheson, in a telegram sent the previous night, whether he denied that the only missing link in the Lattimore case was proof of either membership in the Communist Party or payment to him by the party and that if such proof were forthcoming, Mr. Lattimore could accurately be labeled, as the Senator had previously done, the top Soviet agent in the country. In a speech in New Jersey on Saturday, the Senator had again attacked Mr. Lattimore, as well as again questioning the loyalty of Ambassador Philip Jessup and career diplomat John Service.

The Supreme Court let stand the Court of Appeals decision in the cases of writers John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, found in contempt of Congress for refusing to declare in fall, 1947 to HUAC whether they had ever been Communists. They were each sentenced to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. They had claimed on appeal that under the First and Fifth Amendments, they could not be compelled to provide such information on associations. But the Court of Appeals, the prior year, had found that the right to remain silent and the right to free speech and association were subject to curtailment when the national interests were at stake, that HUAC therefore had the right to make the inquiry and require an answer "to avert the anticipated evil", i.e., the spread of Communism in the society.

The vote of the Court on the decision to deny review was 6 to 2, with Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas favoring it. Justice Tom Clark, who had been Attorney General at the time of the prosecutions, took no part in the decision. The other eight of the Hollywood Ten also being prosecuted for contempt, who had not yet gone to trial, had agreed with prosecutors to waive a jury trial if the Court of Appeals decision were upheld in the Lawson and Trumbo cases.

It should be noted that there has been some indication in the past that the deaths of Justices Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge may have influenced the outcome of this case. Theoretically, that is possible, insofar as the case being accepted for review, as it only takes four Justices to grant a hearing. But given that six of the Justices, including new Justice Sherman Minton, replacing Justice Rutledge, disfavored granting a hearing, likely forecast a negative decision by a 5 to 4 majority, even had the two liberal Justices not died. (Justice Clark replaced Justice Murphy.) It is conceivable, however, that one of the Justices voting against grant of a hearing might have been swayed to vote for reversal. But that was still far from being a likely scenario in such a high profile case. If one of the five Justices who would have been in the majority prior to the deaths felt strongly enough on the issue, they would have surely voted at least to grant review, a decision which could have been subsequently changed. Yet, we recall Justice Felix Frankfurter's frank explanation regarding the process of denying review and its not necessarily reflecting adversely on the merits of the case, only signifying that fewer than four Justices agreed on granting review. On a case of such importance, especially in the atmosphere of intimidation and coercion created by HUAC, one would think, however, that there was less likely to be an issue apart from the merits which motivated the vote against a hearing. But in the end, whether the outcome would have been different, had Justices Murphy and Rutledge not died the prior summer, is left to the realm of complete speculation. Inevitably, with a change of even one Justice on the Court, the dynamic of the Court often changes with it, as no two individuals are precisely identical in their personalities, their ability to sway other Justices, or their jurisprudence.

Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia proposed that Congress create a commission to regulate the soft coal industry and fix coal prices at the mines.

Democrats were planning to use the new drive for the Brannan farm plan, expansion of unemployment insurance, the killing of the middle-income housing program in Congress, and the extension of rent controls as major issues against the Republicans in the fall. The President was also expected to make a cross-country tour soon in which he would lash out at the tactics of Senator McCarthy.

The President ended his three week vacation in Key West and prepared to return to Washington. He was considering appointment of Los Angeles businessman John A. McCone, future head of the Atomic Energy Commission between 1958 and 1961 and CIA director between 1961 and 1965, to be Undersecretary of the Air Force.

In Benton Harbor, Mich., eight Naval reservists escaped injury when their PV-2 twin-engine plane crash-landed just off the Lake Michigan shoreline as they returned from a weekend flight to Bermuda by way of Norfolk. The plane had run low on fuel when they were unable to locate the airport and they ditched in the water to avoid a crash over land.

In Madrid, the only child of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Carmen Franco, was wed, becoming the Marquesa de Villaverde.

In Indianapolis, a man told police of being hit in the stomach by a hoodlum, but that he was not hurt. The hoodlum's fist, however, had not fared so well as the man was wearing a plaster cast for a recent back injury.

Perhaps the hoodlum, too, was related to Sr. Franco.

On the editorial page, "About That Minority Report" tells of some having observed that while Senator Frank Graham now said that he opposed the FEPC because of its Federal sanctions for noncompliance, while supporting the general notion of nondiscrimination in employment, there was no apparent dissent by him on the FEPC when it had been endorsed in 1947 by the report of the President's Civil Rights Committee, of which he was a member.