Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  Like Ferguson and his subcommittee colleagues, the members of the loyalty board could not believe that Remington was as naïve and clueless as he claimed to be. “The surreptitious manner and character of the meetings [between Remington and Bentley] indicate conscious wrongdoing,” the panel decided. “We think he must have known that he was imparting nonpublic information to a person closely identified with communists.” On September 22, the board decided against him, determining that there was reasonable doubt about his loyalty. Remington could have opted out of the game right then by accepting the verdict and moving on to a career outside government. But he didn’t. Instead, he hired a top lawyer, Joseph Rauh, an anticommunist liberal, who began the process of mounting an appeal. Rauh was convinced of Remington’s innocence, calling him a “strange combination of…brilliance and gullibility” and “a decent boy.” But Remington was lying to his lawyer just as he had misled the loyalty board and the Ferguson Committee. For one thing, there was communist activity in his past. More significantly, he had known Bentley was a communist, and he had indeed passed her information not intended for the public.

  But his lawyer knew nothing of this. To him, Remington was a bright, personable, charmingly ingenuous young man unjustly accused. Five days after the loyalty board’s ruling, Rauh filed an appeal to the federal review board. At the same time, he announced plans to file a libel suit against Elizabeth Bentley, the result of remarks she had made a week and a half earlier on the popular NBC radio program Meet the Press. Interviewed live by a panel of journalists, she had been challenged to repeat her allegations against any of the people she had named at the hearings.

  “Now, here, Miss Bentley, you don’t have congressional immunity, would you now identify William Remington as a communist?” one of the journalists asked her.

  She tried to avoid answering directly, but the journalist persisted. Finally, she said, “Yes, I would certainly do that.” Rauh was listening to the broadcast and thought the statement could not go unchallenged given the appeal he was mounting. He would move against Bentley on two fronts simultaneously.

  While the libel case was taking shape, Rauh concentrated on presenting Remington’s appeal to the loyalty review panel, a seemingly unsympathetic tribunal that included an ultraconservative attorney and the past national commander of the American Legion. Bentley’s testimony, Rauh told the panel, was “charged with inconsistencies and impressions and conclusions and superficialities.” Remington did nothing wrong. He was, his lawyer claimed, a young and inexperienced man “seduced by what he thought were newspapermen.” Remington told the panel that he was “embarrassed” by the relationship he had with Bentley. “I was not entirely alert in my perception,” he told the review board, once again casting himself as a naïf. “But I did nothing wrong.” The panel then listened to a parade of impressive character witnesses, including the former president of Dartmouth, a distinguished professor from Columbia, the assistant secretary of Commerce and the chairman of Truman’s Economic Council.

  But the witness Rauh most wanted the loyalty review board to hear was Elizabeth Bentley, the only person to link his client to disloyal activities. He planned to cross-examine her, to blow holes in her testimony against his client, to expose her for the liar he thought she was—and to win the day. The board had granted Rauh’s request to call Bentley for questioning but had no subpoena power to back it up. Bentley could be “invited,” but she could not be forced. That turned out to be a moot point, because no one seemed to be able to locate her. The Spy Queen had disappeared from public view. Rauh was eager to find her, but he wasn’t the only one looking for the elusive Miss Bentley. Remington’s other lawyer, the man he had hired to handle the libel case, was also on her trail.

  That case was shaping up as the loyalty review board continued its deliberations. Rauh was insistent that Bentley’s radio statement be challenged. Inaction, he told Remington, might be seen by the board as an admission that Bentley’s charges were true. Accordingly, Remington hired Richard Green, a libel specialist who had just won a high-profile case in New York. Before filing the suit, Green sent a strongly worded letter to Bentley—simultaneously released to the press—demanding a retraction. She did not respond. In early October, he proceeded with the case, filing a $100,000 suit against Bentley, NBC, and General Foods, the sponsor of Meet the Press. By late fall, the hunt for Bentley was on, with a U.S. marshal and various process servers attempting to locate her to deliver a subpoena so Remington’s lawyers could take her deposition, and people from Rauh’s office trying to find her so she could be cross-examined before the loyalty board. In view of her now very public persona, the press dogged the story. RED WITNESS MISSING AT 100-G SLANDER SUIT ran a headline in the New York Daily Mirror. A few days later, the World Telegram broke the news that Bentley was sequestered at a Catholic retreat in the Bronx. The story made all the newspapers in New York and Washington, D.C. Bentley, said an item in the Washington Times Herald, was “quietly pursuing her religious meditations while U.S. marshals, attorneys and process servers were frantically seeking her.”

  It was true. Bentley had spent most of the fall studying the Catholic faith with Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, one of the leading anticommunist ideologues in the American Catholic hierarchy, a man who was busy making a specialty out of converting former communists. The Church itself had been a strident opponent of communism since the early 1930s, when Father Charles Coughlin, the so-called Radio Priest, had taken to the airwaves to lecture on its evils—along with the attendant and related evils of the New Deal. When Bentley came to Washington, D.C., to testify during the summer, her friend and fellow ex-communist Louis Budenz, himself a recent and well-publicized convert to the faith via the ministrations of the Monsignor, had introduced her to Sheen. After a period of private instruction, on November 5, at a church in the capital, Bentley was baptized into the faith with Budenz and his wife standing as her godparents. Afterward, she returned to New York, secluding herself at the Susan Devin Residence, a Catholic retreat.

  Some thought her conversion was self-serving and its timing all too convenient. Her newfound faith could enhance her credibility at a time when it needed enhancing, and contacts within the powerful anticommunist Catholic movement could be important allies. These accusations may have been, at least in part, true. But it was also true that Bentley was an embattled woman who had lost her faith in communism and was looking for something else to replace it in her life. The decision to become a Catholic may have been both strategic and expedient, but it was also a personal, emotional response to the void Bentley felt. For whatever else communism was to her, it was also, for a while, a comforting, all-consuming dogma, absolute, unquestionable, and infallible. It was something to believe in with heart and head. It gave shape and meaning to one’s life. “People who are genuine communists as I was,” Bentley told the press after her conversion, “…they can’t go into a vacuum if they give up communism. They must have something to tie to.” For Bentley, at least for the moment, that was Catholicism.

  On November 21, the notorious Spy Queen made her first public appearance in months, delivering a strident lecture in Rochester, New York, where she had graduated from high school more than twenty years before. Her topic: the Communist Menace. She had been asked to testify at Remington’s loyalty review board in Washington, D.C., the next day but had declined, citing this and other commitments. Remington’s lawyer was beside himself. He felt his case rested on cross-examining Bentley, but first he couldn’t find her and then he couldn’t pin her down. When the news of Bentley’s conversion hit the papers, Rauh contacted high Church dignitaries, appealing directly to them to impress on Bentley the urgency of an appearance before the board. His request was declined. Now it was late fall, the case had been dragging on for months, and he was no closer to being able to question Bentley.

  The hearing took place, as scheduled, on November 22, without her. Rauh presented a voluminous brief with evidence of Remington’s anticommunist views and a
ctivities for the past ten years and testimonials to his loyalty. The evidence seemed very much in his favor, but the panel made no decision. That was because behind the scenes, William Rogers, counsel for the Ferguson Committee, was assuring the review board that Bentley would in fact testify. He had been instructed by Ferguson to find her and see if he could persuade her to participate. Bentley’s absence from the hearing made Homer Ferguson nervous. It was her testimony before his committee that had first revealed Remington’s name. If Remington was cleared by the review board, it was not just Bentley’s credibility that would suffer, it was Ferguson’s as well. Based on Rogers’s promise to deliver Bentley, the panel agreed to reopen the proceedings for the purpose of hearing directly from Remington’s accuser. A date of December 15 was set. But on December 13, Bentley’s lawyer sent a cable to the head of the review board, saying that it would be “impossible” for Bentley to attend. She would be in New Orleans, giving another lecture.

  Remington’s lawyer was convinced that Bentley was refusing to appear because she was lying about his client, and her testimony would not stand up to his cross-examination. But she wasn’t lying. Remington was the one who was lying. Bentley used the excuse of being too busy when she twice refused to appear before the review board. She did, in fact, have paid speaking engagements, commitments that were important to her not just for the income—her only source these days—but for her sense of self-worth, her belief that she was now doing something good and important with her life. Still, the lectures could have been rescheduled had she wanted to testify. She could have found the time. But she didn’t, even though not just the loyalty review board decision was at stake but also, by extension, the libel case. It is possible that she was just following the advice of her lawyer to keep a low profile. But it is far more likely that it was her decision alone.

  The spotlight had already proved to be much hotter than she had bargained for. The press had her in its sights. There was a lawsuit against her. There had been private threats, public insults, nasty rumors, denunciations, and personal slurs. Bentley wanted and needed to feel in control of her public image, of her life. Her speaking engagements gave her that feeling. She could pick her venues, choose the friendliest of audiences, and lecture without interruption. She had in many ways been in control of her congressional appearances as well. They were orchestrated by those who believed her and believed in her, by those who had a stake in her performing well. Certain questions were asked and others were not. The questioners were, for the most part, kind and accommodating. But Remington’s lawyer would be neither. He was out to disprove her story, to poke holes in her credibility, to show her up. She would be grilled. And she had every reason to believe that nothing good would come of it. She had no evidence to present against Remington, only her own recollections. She might very well be seen as an untrustworthy witness—a former communist, a former spy, and now a turncoat—impugning the reputation of a certified golden boy. Whatever happened, it would be another field day for the press. It was an intimidating prospect, even for someone who was telling the truth. And especially for someone who was struggling to find her footing, who was searching, with much apprehension, for her future.

  Perhaps she was too distracted by her own concerns, the direction her life was taking, not knowing how to make sense of it or what to do next. Perhaps she thought that Remington would lose the loyalty review case without her help. He had lost the first round. And he was, she knew and he knew, guilty. Better to concentrate on her own life, to find meaning and direction in Catholicism, to hone her anticommunist image in controlled public appearances, to stay away from controversy as much as she could. For any or all of these reasons, she once again shunned the loyalty review hearing. A decision would have to be made without her. Rauh pleaded with the board to act before Christmas. The case had been dragging on for too long. His client had been on suspension from his Department of Commerce position since July. But the panel continued to take its time. It wasn’t until February 10, 1949, more than four months after Remington’s lawyer had begun the appeals process, that the decision was announced.

  “The record here is the uncorroborated statement of a woman who refuses to submit herself to cross-examination,” wrote one of the board members in his opinion, noting that the case came down to the word of a “a self-confessed spy” against a “young man whose every action in public employment showed a distinct anticommunist slant.” The other members concurred, and the review panel unanimously reversed the decision of the lower board, clearing Remington of disloyalty charges and ordering him reinstated, with $5,000 back pay, in his Commerce job. Delighted and relieved, that evening Remington called a press conference at the Washington Hotel where he told journalists that he owed his clearance to “the vigor of democracy.” His lawyers were doubly pleased. A clearance by the review board could have only positive effects on the libel case.

  Remington’s libel lawyer had been busy putting together the case against Bentley while the review board deliberated. He had hired a private investigator, a former FBI agent, to dig around, in hopes of uncovering something he could use against her in the pretrial hearing. One of the first items to surface was the rumor that Bentley had been treated for psychiatric conditions at Yale University hospital. When the FBI got wind of this, the New Haven office immediately made “discreet inquiries.” Information like this, if true, could hurt not only the libel case but also cast doubt on all of Bentley’s statements. The cost to the Bureau, in both credibility and status, would be enormous. But within days, New Haven agents sent Hoover an urgent teletype with good news: There was no record of Bentley ever having been admitted to the clinic. Hoover could breathe easier. But the investigation continued, with the PI tracking down Bentley’s adviser at Columbia who implied that she had not been the author of her own master’s thesis, and a graduate student (now a professor) who had known her in Italy and who painted a potentially damaging portrait of the young Elizabeth Bentley. She had run amok in Italy, he told the investigator, drinking to excess and carrying on promiscuously. Meanwhile, Bentley’s lawyers were busy digging into Remington’s past, tracking down leads about his communist activities prior to coming to Washington, D.C. Both sides were ready for a fight.

  First, there was the pretrial hearing in mid-March 1949, conducted to determine whether Remington actually had a case. There, NBC’s lawyers, who represented all the codefendants—Bentley, Meet the Press, and the network—argued that Bentley’s remarks were, first of all, slander not libel, and second, that she had merely repeated the privileged testimony she gave to the Ferguson Committee, which was protected from prosecution. Remington’s lawyer countered that whether the words were slander or libel made little difference. The point was that her remarks were damaging to his client’s reputation and career. Nothing could be more detrimental to an economist in government, Richard Green argued, than to be called a communist. Furthermore, Bentley’s remarks were actually serious criminal allegations. In accusing him of communist activities, she was also accusing him of perjury and of violating two U.S. statutes. The federal judge assigned to the case listened closely and then deliberated all through the spring and summer and into the fall without handing down a decision.

  Meanwhile, Bentley had to get on with her life. She needed to find secure, gainful employment, something steadier and more reliable than the occasional public lecture. She was, as she had always been, a woman who supported herself, who had no family money to cushion her, no spouse to maintain her. But she did have—or at least she used to have years ago—a vocation. She was a teacher. She had a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees, and several years of classroom experience. However, her experience was now almost two decades old, and her current notoriety made her a poor candidate for any position dealing with young people. Finding employment would not be easy, but her new friends in the anticommunist Catholic movement could help. In the fall of 1949 she secured a position teaching political science at Mundelein College, a prestigious Catho
lic women’s school on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Her Catholic friends pulled strings for her, for it was not just her shaky credentials and haunted past that stood in her way but the fact that virtually all the staff and faculty at Mundelein were nuns. Bentley hoped to get back to a more normal life, to settle into the comforting routines of academia. But with the libel suit pending, normal life was not possible.

  On December 7, just before Mundelein recessed for the Christmas holidays, the judge who had heard the pretrial arguments eight and a half months before finally delivered his decision. In a sixteen-page opinion, he dismissed the arguments set forth by the NBC lawyers and ruled that Remington did, indeed, have a case. Now Bentley faced the very real possibility of a trial, which would mean a major disruption of her new life. It would mean traveling back and forth to New York to confer with her lawyers and give her deposition to Remington’s legal team. It would mean traveling back for the trial, to testify and be cross-examined. It would mean headlines again.

  Richard Green, eager to get on with Remington’s case after such a long wait, put the NBC lawyers on notice that he planned to move ahead to trial, a tactic designed to provoke the network into settling out of court. A week later, Green and the top NBC attorney were negotiating in private. Green demanded $10,000. The NBC lawyer countered with $2,500. Green held firm, warning that the price of a settlement would only escalate. The network’s lawyer parried. Perhaps a settlement was not possible, he told Green. The network lawyers were impressed with Bentley’s story and would look forward to a trial. Green thought the NBC lawyer was bluffing and that he would come back with a counteroffer of $5,000, which Green would negotiate up to $7,500, and that would be the end of it.