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What are your recollections of how the Rapp-Coudert process unfolded?

It unfolded first in the press. You're talking about a lot of papers, screaming headlines in the Journal American and in the News and The Mirror and The World Telegram, names forty-three communists, that kind of thing. These were big headlines and this is big stuff. It came as a big shock to us, obviously. We weren't prepared for this.

You weren't?

Oh, no. It came as a very sudden thing for us. Maybe some people may have known. I didn't.

That something like this might happen.

Might happen, or that something was happening. Very often you know these things, but I did not know.

Was it a shock in the sense that you never thought that being a red meant your job was at stake?

We never thought of it, at least I never thought of it that way. You did what you were doing in a free society, in a place where ideas clashed, and people had beliefs. You talked about the ideas you believed in. They were sort of broad kind of concepts. You see, this is a period of a strong anti-war movement on campus, student movement. The student union was active and big. There were student strikes. There were a lot things happening, a lot of involvement. A lot of people were sympathetic. We always worked in organizations with students, with faculty, etc., so you had a sort of protective color around it, around the work you did. And in that sense, you were well- known, respected, and liked, and you were treated as a radical, I guess, if the word means anything -- liberal, radical, progressive, etc. And in some cases you told people what you believed in and tried to work with them. But these were times when the student movement was strong. There was a general strong liberal sentiment in the country.

So it came as a shock when you began to read these headlines. What was the immediate impact on you and on your brothers also?

Once we saw it, we began to examine what the possibilities were here. Then other people came forward to corroborate, lesser people. See, he named a lot of people, and some people who were named were trying to find cover for themselves, and so they testified.