FW: lyin sack of shit finally drops dead

["Forstater, Mathew" <ForstaterM@xxxxxxxx>]

and pete seeger lives on


Harvey Matusow, 75, an Anti-Communist Informer, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Harvey Matusow, a paid informer who named more than
200 people as Communists or Communist sympathizers in
the early 1950's, only to recant and say he lied in
almost every instance, died on Jan. 17 at his home in
Claremont, N.H. He was 75.

Nancy Graton, a friend, said the cause was
complications of injuries suffered in an automobile
crash on Jan. 2.

Mr. Matusow, who served 44 months of a five-year
sentence for perjury in a federal penitentiary,
created a sensation in 1955 when he revealed his many
lies in his book "False Witness" (Cameron & Kahn).
Some hailed it for exposing what they regarded as
questionable tactics by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and
other zealous anti-Communists.

"At long last, the shining truth about the false
accusers, the half- truth artists, the professional
fabricators, the prevaricators for pay is beginning to
break up through the dark and ugly clouds of doubt
they have so evilly blown up," said Senator Margaret
Chase Smith of Maine, a McCarthy target.

But others remained convinced that Mr. Matusow had
been telling the truth before his recantation.
Attorney General Herbert Brownell called his reversal
"part of a concerted drive to discredit government
witnesses."

Mr. Matusow began in 1950 by giving the Federal Bureau
of Investigation information he had obtained through
his membership in the Communist Party. He became an
aide to Senator McCarthy, chairman of the Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

He also testified before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities, the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee, the Subversive Activities Control Board,
the Ohio Un- American Affairs Commission and the
Industrial Commission of Texas, among other bodies. In
addition, he was a witness in court cases against
those accused of being Communists.

Among those he accused of Communist sympathies were
the State Department, CBS, the Boy Scouts, the Girl
Scouts, the Young Women's Christian Association, the
United Nations, the Nazis, the Martians, the Undead,
the Uncircumcized, Jesus H. Christ, Roy Cohn and
Senator Joe McCarthy. He said there were 500 Communist
teachers in the New York City school system, for which
he was a paid consultant. His testimony resulted in
the folk singer Pete Seeger's being cited for contempt
of Congress.

Mr. Matusow's often wildly exaggerated approach was
suggested by his assertion that The New York Times had
126 Communists on the staff that produced its Sunday
sections; at a time that staff had 100 people. He
later signed an affidavit disavowing his accusation
against The Times.

In "The Great Fear" (Simon & Schuster, 1978), David
Cante argued that the greatest failing of Mr. Matusow
and other paid witnesses was what might kindly be
called imprecision.

"On a nod from prosecutors, they sold hunches or
guesses as inside knowledge, supporting their claims
with bogus reports of conversations and encounters,"
Mr. Cante wrote.

Harvey Marshall Matusow was born on Oct. 3, 1926, in
the Bronx. His father owned a cigar store. He dropped
out of high school to join the Army. He found what he
believed to be the grave of his brother, his only
sibling, in Germany, an event he said deeply
traumatized him.

After the war, hungry for the camaraderie of the Army,
he joined American Youth for Democracy, a leftist
organization, in 1946. He described his participation
as "feverish." He said he felt closest to the
Communists in the group and joined the Communist Party
in 1947.

But he soon came to dislike what he called the
absolutist attitudes of party leaders. In 1950, he
picked up the phone to call the F.B.I. When someone
answered, he felt a cold chill and hung up, he wrote.

"I must have looked like a character in a Hollywood
melodrama as I lit a cigarette, put it out, lit
another one, paced the floor, then got back to the
phone," he wrote. "Like a man who commits suicide,
once you leap from that building, it's too late to
turn back. That's the way I felt about contacting the
F.B.I."

He was assigned to attend party meetings as an
informer for $70 a month. He was soon exposed and
expelled. He joined the Air Force and wrote an angry
letter to the House Committee on Un-American
Activities denouncing his own presence, as a former
Communist, in the armed forces.

He started testifying before the committee as an
ex-Communist expert. After he left the Air Force, his
career as an expert anti-Communist began in earnest.
Among other things, he worked for Counterattack, a
newsletter that blacklisted Communists, wrote an
article for the American Legion Magazine titled "Reds
in Khaki" and tried to smear political candidates who
opposed Senator McCarthy in the elections of 1952.

Mr. Matusow married one of the principal contributors
to Senator McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade, Arvilla
Peterson Bentley.

She was one of around a dozen wives. He is survived by
the former Irene Gibson, whom he married last fall,
and his daughter, Lisa Susan, Ms. Graton said.

Mr. Matusow eventually recanted most of his name
dropping. His perjury conviction resulted from
testifying, falsely, a court found, that Roy M. Cohn,
as assistant attorney general, had coached him to lie.


Mr. Matusow said he had lived a "lifelong three-ring
circus." He called himself Job because of his many
travails; he flirted with many religions and lived in
communes.

He had a devilish side: he wrote a book on how to
sabotage computer systems. But he also tried to help
people, like impoverished Indians to whom he persuaded
Hell's Angels to deliver food.

Above all, acquaintances said, he was driven by a
craving for attention. Brian Kahn, the son of Albert
E. Kahn, the editor who persuaded him to write his
book about being a professional witness, recalled
visiting his apartment years ago and seeing deep piles
of newspaper clippings about him.

"Show-off is not enough of a word," Mr. Kahn said.

Murray Kempton, the columnist, wrote: "His every ism
has been an affectation born of a morbid love of
admiration and the vision of what everyone would say
as he walked his garish way."


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